ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that social work in the UK has been colonized by a bureaucratic rationality that privileges procedures, systems, pro-formas and the electronic turn. It reviews important ideas within phenomenology a broad philosophical church which provides rich understanding of human subjectivity and how it is embedded within the 'lifeworld'. The phenomenological paradigm continues to hold weight in the canon of social science whether it is in its application to qualitative social research or in relation to its theorization of the subject-in-society. In effect, was interested in the subject's lifeworld and he was one of the first thinkers to coin the term. Constructivist social work is another approach that chimes with phenomenology given its emphasis on narrative in social work. Bourdieusian social work embraces a radicalized phenomenology in the sense it acknowledges the omnipresence of oppressive power on the lower classes in particular. Phenomenology recasts human life as something dynamic in nature, a verb-like happening, an unfolding experience.
